Up down & sideways = Kho ki pa lü / a film from the U-ra-mi-li project ; producer, Manas Malhotra ; location sound, script, edit and direction, Anushka Meenakshi & Iswar Srikumar.

Portland, OR : Collective Eye Films, 2018.

1 streaming video (84 minutes)

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"If not for you, I have no other true love When we work together the sun sets early Without you I am nothing" Close to the India - Myanmar border is the village of Phek in Nagaland. Around 5000 people live here, almost all of whom cultivate rice for their own consumption. As they work in cooperative groups -- preparing the terraced fields, planting saplings, or harvesting the grain and carrying it up impossibly steep slopes -- the rice cultivators of Phek sing. The season's change, and so does the music, transforming the mundane into the hypnotic. The love that they sing of is also a metaphor for the need for the other - the friend, the family, the community, to build a polyphony of voices. Stories of love, stories of the field, stories of song, stories in song. 'Up Down & Sideways' is a musical portrait of a community of rice cultivators and their memories of love and loss, created from working together on the fields. It is the first feature film from the u-ra-mi-li project, a larger body of work that looks at the connections between music and labor.

Images / Online / Video & Film

Sino-Tibetan (Other)

January 27, 2020